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Still, the hybrid *#tlzqm7 nature of opera exposed it to ridicule. But despite ridicule and the protests of impatient listeners the protean art fiourished. Endless combinations of the music of words and the music of instruments, embel- lished with ballet and the decorative arts, carried the messages of myth, poetry, drama, and panorama. Opera became the profiigate art as large casts and lavish settings made it the most expensive public entertainment. It was the only art that without embarrassment called itself red pumps "grand." Then in the nineteenth century "grand opera" came into English from France, where for works suitable for performance at the Paris Opera it was distinguished from "opera comique." It came to mean a serious epic or historical opera in four or five acts with chorus and ballet in which there was no spoken dialogue but all the musical numbers were christian louboutin alti connected by recitatives (sung dialogue). This kind of musical drama dominated the Paris Opera in the first half of the nineteenth century. A rising and prospering middle class (Karl Marx's contemned "bourgeoisie") became patrons of this luxurious art. Seventy-six volumes oflibrettos by Eugene Scribe (1791-1861) and numerous compositions of Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) scored box-office successes again and again. Melodramatic plots and sudden emotional contrasts called for fiamboyant music. Performances became longer and longer. Meyer- beer's L'Africaine lasted six hours. Plots became ever more complicated, choruses grew, and crowd scenes multiplied, with a new generation of scene designers. The heroic singer held center stage. Wagner contemptuously called this a style of "effects without causes." In Western Europe it was an age of Supra TK Women Society white point black grandiose political hopes, volatile city mobs, and revolutions without number. In Scribe's first work for the Paris Opera (La Muette de Portici, 1828), the heroine, a mute, becomes the victim of the populace she and her brother are trying to defend. When performed in Brussels on August 25, 1830, it sparked a climactic uprising in the movement to establish the Belgian state. It is no wonder that nervous princes kept their censors Supra Vaiders Women Black Green Red Yellow busy! Mere political oratory seemed feeble stage to inspire revolutionary ardor against the power of the grand opera or patriotic awe. Now grand opera proclaimed the emerging modern nations. Two new nations, one of the North and the other of the South, each produced an opera composer laure- ate. Each consummated his own brilliant marriage of the arts-one Italian and Romantic, the other German and Teutonic. Born in the same year, each expressed his country's new reach for national identity. Giuseppe Verdi(1813-1901), immersed in the warm peasant tradition, remained rooted in Sant' Agata near his native Busseto in the duchy of Parma, where he finally